ART :: JULY 14, 2004

Markers of death become iconic memorials

By HARRY WILLIAMS

We see them while traveling at top speed on the highway, a quick glimpse of color and form, there and then gone. We see them at intersections, in the grass, on telephone poles, vying for our attention amid the cacophony of traffic lights, highway signs, bumper stickers, garage sale pointers and the signage of nearby businesses. We see them, and perhaps every now and then we may actually even look at them.

Descansos from the local area: (top) A grouping of memorials at Cedar and Shiawassee streets; (middle) a detail of the “Bermudez” descanso; (bottom left) R.I.P. Jamie Johnson, at the corner of Grand Rive and Delta avenues; (bottom right) a tribute to Chad Lupnitz was left on I-96 near the 90 mile marker.

“Roadside memorials” is a bland but descriptive term for these markers more commonly known as “descansos.” Descanso is a Spanish word meaning rest or relief. Descansos are usually small roadside crosses or shrines adorned with plastic flowers, religious icons and other decorations. In the past, they were markers erected at places where a funeral procession stopped to rest on its journey between a church and the cemetery. An association was soon made between the road, an interrupted journey and death as a final destination.

Descansos don’t mark a grave or the final resting place of human remains. They mark the site of a death, the place on Earth where the terrifying event actually happened. We sit in our cars talking on cell phones, changing radio stations or casually sipping fountain soda at the scenes of what must have been unforeseen and horribly unexpected tragedies. Should we choose to attend to them, descansos will remind us that death can be swift, sudden and can occur anywhere.

The planning that is often evident in the design and creation of descansos raises these markers and shrines above being simple memorials and establishes them as one of the most sincere and passionate genres of folk art to be found. They seem to emerge from the visual experiences and profound sorrow of the untrained artists who are moved to create them.

Several descansos located together on Cedar Street near Oldsmobile Park are excellent examples the type of artistic works that find expression on public roads after the loss of a loved one. One, a simple, graying, unfinished wooden cross, hand labeled with the name “Bermudez” in black letters, is adorned with a wreath of artificial flowers and raffia. Below, a weathered decoration representing an open Bible is accented with pale blue roses fixed to the blank right hand page. Nearly invisible, though, on a gravel tableau in front of the book appears to be a painstakingly arranged “Passion Play” created from a combination of small plastic figures, a tiny cross, seashells and orange rocks.

These juxtapositions of the organic and the artificial, the symbolic and the narrative, the secular and the spiritual, indicate that the tragedy at this particular locale deeply affected this artist on many different levels. Michael C. Kearl, a professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, describes how our relationships with death have changed over time. While once we related socially with most individuals we knew personally, he claims we now relate mostly with the social roles those individuals hold, “roles [that] became more important than their replaceable occupants. This idea of being disposable and replaceable is, of course, a major assault on individuals’ sense of dignity and esteem, making their deaths relatively insignificant events.”

“The scope of grief,” according to Kearl, “is limited to the family and friends of the deceased, who are given but a few days off from work before being expected to return in a social system usually unaffected by the death.” The artist that created and installed “Bermudez” makes a powerful statement for the significance of this particular death to the survivors, and makes it in such a way that we might all experience the epic tragedy along with them.

In 1624, John Donne coined the famous phrase, “No man is an island,” referring to the more traditional, long-standing human experience of death, already rapidly passing even then: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind / and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls / it tolls for thee.” Living in a media-driven society that continually saturates us with fictional and non-fictional deaths, we, unlike Donne, are no longer significantly affected by strangers dying.

“Unlike the contacts with real death in the past, media deaths generally do not generate moral and social questions. Instead,” Kearl says, “we become desensitized to death. Publicized boxscores of holiday fatalities on the nation’s roads and death counts from accidents, wars or natural calamities become as meaningful as sports statistics.”

Local descansos help keep us in touch with the significance and importance of even a single death, and in their mixing of artistic media, they do it in a highly symbolic, deeply personal and extremely visual way.

There are numerous examples of such descansos around Lansing and throughout Michigan. Some are austere, some are elaborate, colorful displays. Some are handmade, others combine store-bought materials in unusual ways. All of them seek to personalize the traffic fatalities that might otherwise have merely drifted past us as nameless statistical data. And perhaps all of them serve to foreshadow the fleeting quality of our own lives as well as the irreplaceable importance of those whom we love.

Michigan, like other states, has laws that officially ban these memorials (perhaps because they violate the separation of church and state, since they are usually found on public property or casements). It is heartening to realize, though, that this ban is only reluctantly enforced by police and the Department of Transportation. Our society more typically chooses to leave only shattered glass and small scraps of shorn automobile swept to the side of the road to publicly mark a traffic fatality’s occurrence. It speaks volumes about the power of descansos, this unique and natural form of visual self-expression, that even employees of our bureaucracy are moved to feel the passion and the pain of the artists and are hesitant to interfere with the public display of such important and extremely human works of art.

One cruciform memorial in South Lansing, vertically labeled “DALE” summarizes the impact of his loss with another carefully designed marker. This wooden cross was cut with extreme care and painted white. At the cross’s intersection, another piece of wood, painted bright red and in the shape of what appear to be wings, is carved with Dale’s lifespan digits “69-00” and a simple Valentine heart. The entire cross has been painstakingly bolted high on a telephone pole. However, a viewer taking a closer look near the crown of the cross might be surprised to also see a faded, laminated photo of the victim himself, wearing a cap and smiling.

The simple elegance of this public expression of personal grief is highlighted by its lofty placement on the contrasting gray, raw, splintered surface of the grounded utility pole. One imagines the combination of sorrow, love and pride with which this memorial was designed, created and tenderly set into place. “Dale” might have simply been an anonymous fatality, another faceless statistic to us all, and nothing more. Something innate within his loved ones, however, moved them to create this site-specific work of art to personalize Dale, to express to the community that here was a human who indeed had a face, a birth, a family, and was loved — as well as having been tragically lost at that place.

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